A Long Time Coming
Dancers Wendy Whelan and Edward Watson say that they first came up with the idea of collaborating together around ten years ago, when they were both dancing with Christopher Wheeldon’s company Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. It has taken until now for these two internationally acclaimed dancers to be in the same country at the same time long enough for the project to come to fruition. After its premiere in the Linbury Studio Theatre, Whelan and Watson will perform Other Stories on tour, at venues including New York City Center, where Whelan is Artistic Associate.

Portrait of the Artists
Whelan is one of the most iconic American ballerinas of her generation. She has spent most of her career with New York City Ballet, where she danced as a principal from 1991 to her retirement in 2014. Since leaving NYCB she has developed innovative collaborative projects, of which Other Stories is the second, after 2013’s Restless Creature. Watson has been a Principal of The Royal Ballet since 2005. He is highly acclaimed both for his interpretations of the Company’s core repertory, particularly in works by Kenneth MacMillan, and for his role creations for choreographers as diverse as Wayne McGregor and Wheeldon. He was appointed an MBE in 2015.

New Directions
Though Whelan and Watson come from very different ballet traditions, they share a remarkable ability to inhabit a range of styles – both classical and neo-classical in ballet, and, more recently, contemporary dance. For Other Stories they have refused to rest on their laurels. ‘We wanted to think about what else we could be… We didn’t want to do a vanity project, showing off what we already knew we could do. We wanted to use our experience to try something new.’ To that end they have invited five choreographers to create new works.

Together…
Three of the choreographers worked with both the dancers. Javier De Frutos creates First and Wait, a work that ‘very much reflects the spirit of its creation – almost a video diary of the moments we shared in the studio’. In Dance Me to the End of Love, Danièle Desnoyers explores the joint virtuosity of her two dancers, creating a dialogue between the dancers and the onstage musicians. Closing the programme is Arthur Pita’s The Ballad of Mack and Ginny, a tango taking its inspiration from Brecht and Weill’s provocative Threepenny Opera.

… and ApartOther Stories includes a solo work for each of the dancers. Arlene Phillips creates Dance Me to the End of Love on Watson: ‘A once famous dancer enters an empty ballroom that echoes with memories of the woman he loved. He relives the relationship that destroyed him.’ Annie-B Parson uses Whelan’s virtuoso abilities to the full in the abstract Short Ride Out, a work of complex rhythms and different structures that focusses on ‘what Balanchine called “the fact of dancing”’.

A Venn diagram is a useful thing. While it would take half a page of print to explain the – until now – tenuous connection between the dancers Wendy Whelan and Edward Watson (she American, he British), in diagrammatic form it’s the work of a moment. Draw a circle and mark it ‘New York City Ballet’. Draw another labelled ‘The Royal Ballet’. In the lozenge where they intersect, write ‘Christopher Wheeldon’.

The two star dancers have followed distinctly different paths, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and only once, briefly, have their trajectories crossed in a joint performance, and that was a decade ago. But they have a common denominator in the choreographer they both know as Chris, for whom each of these dancers has been a major inspiration. Edward, as many readers will know, was Wheeldon’s first casting choice for jealous king Leontes in his adaptation of The Winter’s Tale. He was also the model for his White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to mention only the most recent roles. For her part, Wendy retired from New York City Ballet last year after 30 years with the company, the latter half of which saw her feature in almost every piece of work Wheeldon set his hand to in New York. So when someone said ‘you two should do something together’, neither dancer had to think twice about it. For not only did they share a history as Wheeldon muses, but each also wanted something of what the other appeared to offer.

Edward says he has always admired Wendy, ‘not just for how she looks on stage, but for her quietly focused approach to everything. It might be to do with being American, but she has that quality more than most and that’s how I want to be’ Wendy, meanwhile, is ready for a new direction, post-City Ballet. ‘If I see an open window with something interesting on the other side, metaphorically, I’m going to grab it,’ she says. ‘Ed has done a load of dramatic roles and I haven’t, but I have a desire to do that. Somebody once told me “If you want something, find someone who has it and hang around them”. I like to think if I spend enough quality time with Ed, it’ll open that part of me up.’

The spur to their coming together was Edward’s trip to New York with The Metamorphosis, Arthur Pita’s dance-theatre adaptation of the Kafka story in which Edward plays the travelling salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Wendy went along to see the show, loved it and afterwards Ed introduced her to the choreographer. ‘They got on really well so I said “Why don’t we ask Arthur to be the first person to make something for our show?”’

The three met again last August around the time of Wendy’s visit to the Linbury Studio Theatre with her touring programme Restless Creature. This time the meeting with Arthur Pita got down to business in a dance studio. Wendy hadn’t known what to expect, ‘but Ed said “Trust me on this” and I’m glad I did. Just this little play-around session we had, which lasted a few hours, was exactly what I was looking for – a new approach.

‘Arthur’s not a ballet choreographer, but I’m really happy about that. This felt more like being in an improv acting class and it was an answer to a prayer. I don’t know if I'd have been ready for this a few years ago, but now the soil is very fertile.'

Both Wendy and Edward are wary of giving too much away, but Edward is prepared to divulge that Arthur Pita's segment of the programme 'will be a story about two people. In the workshop, we basically just got to know each other again, discovering how each other moved... Arthur is working with the idea of the tango, a formal confrontation between two people, and we're playing around with some music and lyrics that suggest Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera. Whether or not that will be the final music, that's the kind of relationship these two people have.'

The evening will ultimately comprise three duets and two solos. A single designer – Jean-Marc Puissant – will give a unified look to the programme ‘and there will be a soundscape that links everything’, according to Ed, although he’s not naming names. Both of the dancers are clear about what they don’t want the evening to be. ‘We’ve seen a lot of those shows where you each do your thing and then everyone claps, and then you have a little pause or a video clip before the next number. There’s nothing wrong with that but we want this to be different. So we’re going for an hour straight through, with one costume to which we can add or subtract things as we go. A lot of modern dance can end up looking a bit similar. I want this to be specifically about us two and where we are now in our dancing lives.’

Physically as well as culturally, Wendy and Ed make an intriguing match. Both are notably long limbed, whippet-lean and hyper-flexible, qualities that choreographers have been happy to exploit over the years. In addition, Wendy, by her own admission, has ‘a crooked back, I have scoliosis. That limits a certain range of motion, but it enhances other shapes I can make well. I have a lot of asymmetry and it’s something not every choreographer understands how to work with. In fact, it hasn’t been a handicap at all, but my doctors are always amazed – they can’t believe that I do what I do. But I’ve dealt with it since I was 12 years old and luckily I had some very good treatment at a young age, so I learned how to support my spine and work with it. The older I get, the more I have to think about it, because it tends to solidify with age. So I have to keep it as malleable and free as possible and I’m on a quest to keep it as juicy as I can.’

As Edward sees it, Wendy is ‘kind of fascinating to look at, but you don’t ever think “her back looks a bit wonky.” You get drawn in. It is truly amazing the ability she has to draw you in and stop time, almost. She still has this magnificence; it’s nothing flashy, more a kind of stillness about her, a focused simplicity.’

All being well, that mature artistry will be magnified to the power of two in their coming collaboration, given Edward’s long experience as a partner as well as a soloist. ‘I think the trust level will be really deep and special because of that, Wendy concludes. ‘We’re both experienced, we’ve both been around the block – we know what we want, we know what’s meaningful to us. And the chemistry is what I really want to show – in lots of different choreographic forms.’

This article was originally published in the Royal Opera House Magazine, received quarterly by the Friends of Covent Garden.

About ten years ago the American illusionist David Blaine performed an extreme endurance stunt in London – he starved himself for 44 days, suspended in a transparent box over the Southbank. As he entered the box he told the crowd why he was doing it: ‘The feeling of wonder is amazing… I’m going to push myself as far as I can.’

Eighty years earlier, Franz Kafka published A Hunger Artist – a short story about a man who confines himself to a circus cage and starves himself to death. But when Kafka’s hunger artist is asked why he has chosen such a performance, he unexpectedly replies: ‘I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss about it and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’

The more cynical of Blaine’s audience speculated that his test of the limits of human endurance was actually an inauthentic spectacle. He is an illusionist, after all – perhaps his water was laced with vitamins, or his blanket steeped in salt for him to suck out. Hunger artists have always courted scepticism, and for Kafka’s perhaps dying was the best way to demonstrate his sincerity.

Kafka’s writing reminds us that the limitations of existence are commonplace, and he is the more engaging for being matter of fact about it. He treats the deaths of his fictional creations (many of them displaying aspects of his own personality) with far less reverence than fans treated Blaine’s experiment.

Kafka himself had been losing weight when he conceived and wrote A Hunger Artist and he would die from tuberculosis a little over two years later. He was also in a relationship with a journalist called Milena Jesenská, to whom he vented emotions, imaginations, nightmares and ailments in almost daily letters. ‘So the thought of death frightens you?’ he wrote in one, ‘One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark.’ For Kafka, like his hunger artist, life was a brief window of futile searching: a yearning for higher understanding foiled at every turn by its impossibility.

When György Kurtág composed his Kafka Fragments song cycle (1985–7) he compiled the libretto from scraps of Kafka’s writings collected over years; diaries, letters and aphorisms, variously cryptic, mundane, confessional and aphoristic. There are hints of haiku-like sense: ‘Like a pathway in the autumn: hardly has it been swept clean, it is covered again with dry leaves.’ There are reflections on the tedium of everyday life: ‘Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life,’ but there are also genuine-sounding confessions: ‘I can’t actually… tell a story, in fact I am almost unable even to speak’.

Kafka’s writing is infused with this awareness of human limitation – from the protagonist in The Trial and his anxious pursuit of an explanation of the unspecified crime an inscrutable court has charged him with, to the frustration faced by the protagonist of The Castle who will never be admitted to the castle and yet cannot return home. In a letter to his friend Max Brod, Kafka wrote, ‘Literature helps me to live, but wouldn’t it be truer to say that it furthers this sort of life?’

Kurtág's song cycle offers a rare opportunity to read Kafka through the prism of music. We have a glimpse of this from Kafka himself, in a line from a letter to Milena included in the Fragments – ‘None sing as purely as those in deepest Hell; it is their singing that we take for the singing of Angels.’

Arthur Pita was awarded the prize for Best Modern Choreography for The Metamorphosis, a dance-theatre work based on the Kafka novella of the same name. The production, which premiered in the Linbury Studio Theatre in 2011, returns in March.

Arthur Pita said:

I am thrilled to share this award with The Metamorphosis team of creatives, cast, crew and all at ROH. Thank you ! It really is a collaboration with all. I am equally thrilled that we will be reviving the work in March with Ed Watson returning to perform the role of Gregor Samsa, and to share this Kafka experience with the audience yet again.

The entire company, from the dancers to the crew are thrilled to have won,' said . 'As an unfunded company, the support of the Royal Opera House has been invaluable to our continued success, and our annual performances at the Linbury are one of the highlights of our year.

The winners are selected by the 60 members of the Dance Section of the Critics’ Circle following an extensive round of nominations and voting. This year, the Royal Ballet received a total of nine nominations, with nominees including Ed Watson, Yuhui Choe, Paul Kay, Beatrix Stix-Brunell and Dawid Trzensimiech.

Other winners include English National Ballet's Ksenia Ovsyanick and Zdenek Konvalina, who both won Outstanding Classical Performance awards; and hip hop stars Teneisha Bonner and Tommy Franzen, who took awards for Outstanding Modern Performance. Principal Character Artist of The Royal Ballet Gary Avis (who recently took part in a live Twitter Q&A for our website) was joint Master of Ceremonies, together with Kenneth Tharp, Chief Executive of The Place.

The Royal Ballet has received nine nominations in this year’s National Dance Awards. The awards, which are now in their 13th year, are presented by the Critics’ Circle – a collection of 50 professional dance writers and critics - and celebrate the very best of dance and ballet in the UK.

Chairman of the Dance Section, Graham Watts said:

"It has been a bumper year! Collectively they have put forward over 250 dancers, choreographers and companies for consideration and so the final shortlists are already very much the elite of 2012."

This year's nominees include Royal Ballet Principals Edward Watson, and Marianela Nuñez, First Soloist Yuhui Choe and Soloists Paul Kay, Beatrix Stix-Brunell and Dawid Trzensimiech. Former Royal Ballet Principal and now Director of English National Ballet Tamara Rojo is also nominated for her work at Covent Garden.

Choreographers recognized include Royal Ballet Artistic Associate Christopher Wheeldon and Alastair Marriott, both nominated in the Best Classical Choreography category for Trespass, which formed part of Metamorphosis:Titian 2012. Our Associate Company Ballet Black are nominated in the same category for Storyville, as well as in the section for Best Independent Company.

Arthur Pita is shortlisted for Best Modern Choreography for The Metamorphosis, which premiered in the Linbury Studio Theatre in 2011. The production returns to the Royal Opera House in March 2013, with Edward Watson reprising his role as the unfortunate Gregor Samsa.

The work, based on the novella by Franz Kafka, premiered last year and was acclaimed by both critics and audiences, winning Edward Watson an Olivier award for his creation of the role of Gregor Samsa, a salesman who awakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a monstrous insect.

In her acceptance speech Monica described the dancers and staff of the Royal Ballet as “committed, passionate and crazy”. Sadly, Edward Watson’s speech was interrupted by a break in broadcasting due to a power cut in Covent Garden. The Metamorphosis will be revived at the Royal Opera House in March of next year.